Craig Johnson

Helena Chemical develops, manufactures, and distributes agricultural chemicals and pesticides. A subsidiary of Marubeni Corp., one of Japan’s largest trading companies, Helena is one of six major competitors in the industry. With four manufacturing plants in the U.S., the company buys chemical precursors from Monsanto and other suppliers and sells to distributors, agricultural co-ops, agribusiness, and home & garden centers.

Pressure from suppliers, along with the need to achieve internal benefits such as lower process costs and faster response times, compelled Helena to move to industry standard ecommerce. Helena's first eCommerce project focused on electronic ordering to suppliers. The Helena ebXML challenge was especially attractive to Oracle because of the company's larger agenda. From the outset, Helena planned its supplier eCommerce project as a prototype for several dozen other planned messaging projects over a two-year period. IBM came to the table with a longstanding relationship with Helena. In fact, Helena was already using MQ for internal messaging functions and planned to deploy an ebXML solution on an AIX platform. Helena’s decision makers came to view Oracle’s offering as a superior architectural platform not only for the immediate ebXML project but also for future messaging projects. Once they fully understood the stack, Helena’s team saw Oracle solution as highly integrated, flexible, and easier to use in ramping up of future messaging projects. The fact that Helena was also an existing Oracle Applications and Application Server user was an important factor in the win.